Menu Bar

Friday, August 11, 2017

A South County Treasure

The Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, R.I., was one of 10
institutions to receive the 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library Service.
(Joanna Detz/ecoRI News photos)

The Tomaquag Museum,
Rhode Island’s only Native American-run museum, sits in a remote corner of a
town that is 96 percent white.

On the way to the museum, one drives on a country road lined by small
Colonial homes. Some of them are bursting with American flags and memorabilia.
At the end of the road, is an open, hilly plain on which the museum, another
Colonial-style home, sits. But the museum’s perhaps-unconventional location
shouldn’t come as a surprise, because, as Lorén Spears, the museum’s executive
director, said, no matter where we are in the United States we are all living
on Indian lands.

Anyone who walks through
the Tomaquag Museum’s entrance will quickly learn that the museum is the antithesis
of a white-centric, Colonial-New England narrative. It tells the story not of
the houses that cluster the Northeast, but of the people on whose land those
houses were built. And while its Native American staff take up the difficult
task of educating people largely taught to believe that indigenous people no
longer exist, it also functions as a community center for many native peoples.

All this happens in a
facility comprised of several buildings. “We’re a small museum in a small
place,” said Spears, a member of the Narragansett tribe.

This small place won a
huge honor in June, when Spears and Christian Hopkins, a 26-year-old college
graduate and Narragansett tribe member whose growth has been shaped by the
museum, traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the 2016 National Medal for Museum and Library
Service from First Lady
Michelle Obama.

The Tomaquag Museum was one of 10 winners, and beat out
larger, more prestigious museums such as the Chicago History Museum and the
Whitney Museum in New York. The medal, which came with a $5,000 grant, is
awarded to institutions that “demonstrate extraordinary and innovative
approaches to public service, exceeding the expected levels of community
outreach.”

The museum was founded
more than 50 years ago by Princess Red Wing of the Narragansett and Wampanoag
tribes, and Eva Butler, an anthropologist. It features exhibits on many facets
of Native American life, centering on indigenous peoples of Rhode Island. Its
contents run the gamut, from displays of contemporary Narragansett finger
weaving to a collection of newspaper articles claiming anti-native police
brutality to a diorama of an old Narragansett church.

The museum, which
provides a multifaceted view of Native Americans, past and present, welcomes
visitors from around the country.

Giving voice to silenced
history
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, the museum holds open visiting hours. The main
collection is housed in a large room with exposed wooden ceilings and an
adjacent, smaller room. Visitors are greeted by museum staff who offer tours of
the museum’s collections.

Narragansett tribe
member Lindsay Montanari, a current museum intern who grew up connected to the
facility, leads visitors gracefully from the beautiful to the ugly, from an
exhibit on Ellison “Tarzan” Brown, a Narragansett long-distance runner famous
for winning the Boston Marathon twice, to news clips of the 2003 State Police
raid on a Narragansett tribe smoke shop.

Visitors need to see
indigenous people’s representations of themselves, because the media usually
gives just one side of the story, Montanari said. In that story, she said,
Native Americans are often “blacked out or whited out,” erased by a discourse
that focuses on white and black people with little mention of the original
inhabitants of the area now known as the United States.

Museum staffers say
Native Americans are often portrayed as if they live only in history books and
not in the contemporary world.

Rhode Island public
school curriculum only perpetuates these misconceptions, according to Spears.
Public schools aren’t mandated to teach the history of indigenous peoples, and
when they do, they often teach narratives that perpetuate negative stereotypes,
she said.

“It’s unfortunate that
we still do not have a cohesive curriculum that is mandatory where the history
of first peoples is a part of the story,” Spears said.

The Rhode Island Grade
Span Expectations (GSEs) for Social Studies, which establishes learning
standards for students in grades K-12, makes little mention of indigenous
history. The Expectations include proscriptions on economics, government and
geography, but in the 56-page document Native Americans are only mentioned a
handful of times as one of many possible examples to be used for fleshing out a
particular social-studies concept.

For example, in one of
the most explicit references to indigenous peoples in the document, the GSEs
for grades 3 and 4 reads: “Students chronicle events and conditions by
describing, defining, and illustrating by example Rhode Island historical
individuals, groups and events (e.g., Roger Williams, Native Americans,
immigrant groups) and how they relate to the context …”

Public schools often
teach Native American history in a way that is incorrect. Spears, who taught in
Newport public elementary schools for more than 10 years before assuming her
position as director of the Tomaquag Museum, still frequently runs classes and
workshops in Rhode Island public schools.

She visits classrooms to
speak to students about indigenous history and culture. Once there, she often
finds pictures of teepees and buffalo, which are relevant to certain Plains
Native Americans, but not to any of Rhode Island’s indigenous peoples. This
inaccuracy is part of a wider phenomenon in which the indigenous peoples of the
United States, constituting a variety of sovereign nations and cultures — as
distinct as “Spain, Portugal and Italy,” Spears said — are viewed as a
monolith.

Although some teachers
in Rhode Island are better informed about indigenous peoples, Spears said most
pass along the skewed information about Native Americans that they themselves
had been taught.

“What they tend to know
is limited to a Colonial perspective of indigenous people,” she said.

The teaching materials
that educators use often contain the same misinformation, helping to perpetuate
the cycle of inaccuracy.

Spears said students
should learn about the indigenous peoples who live near them before they study
those living in the rest of the United States.

Hopkins is a proud
product of the museum’s education and internship programs, but he spent the
beginning of his academic life confounded by the inaccuracies and stereotypes
prevalent in the limited teaching about Native Americans in the public schools
he attended. He recalled getting a 64 out of a 100 on a sixth-grade test on
Native American literature, because he corrected the information on the
worksheet given to him.

“I was like this is all
wrong, this is incorrect,” he said. “So I put in all the correct answers and I
got a 64.”

Breaking stereotypes
The museum, which provides a multifaceted view of Native Americans in the
state, past and present, stands in direct contrast to the stereotypes held by
so many. One section of the museum displays the work of multimedia artist Dawn
Spears, whose work includes acrylic painting, doll-making, photography and
sneaker design. Among the goals of the museum is to break stereotypes of what
indigenous art is supposed to look like.

Another section,
“Pursuit of Happiness: An Indigenous View,” showcases two separate documents
titled “Happiness Denied” and “Happiness Pursued.” These essays reflect
indigenous views on the Declaration of Independence — how rights have been
“denied” in the past and how they are “pursued” today.

A glass case in the
other end of the chamber holds wampum shell beads in several forms, including a
belt made collaboratively by Narragansett tribe members, adornments on a
T-shirt and a 40,000-year-old necklace.

One of the museum’s most
poignant sections is filled with photos and news clippings depicting the 2003
Narragansett smoke-shop raid, during which State Police arrested Native
Americans for selling tax-free cigarettes. Most media outlets at the time
didn’t sympathize with the Narragansetts, who viewed the raid as unjustified, overly
aggressive and racially motivated, especially since they claimed that the state
had given them permission to open a smoke shop.

Telling these histories
helps Native Americans involved with the museum embrace a past that is at once
full of suffering and achievement. In speaking about what history means to
native peoples in Rhode Island, Spears rattled off a devastating list of
injustices: “colonization, genocide, displacement, enslavement.”

As painful as they are,
she said, “These stories help us heal and understand ourselves.”

A display at the
Tomaquag Museum of Native American craftsmanship.

Nuweetooun School
Up until seventh grade, Hopkins, who is a member of the Narragansett tribe and
the Micmac and Nova Scotia Magma tribes, bounced around from school to school.
Part of the problem, he said, lay in his teachers’ attitudes toward Native
Americans. In one school, he presented a science fair project on the question,
“Does smallpox affect different people differently?”

“(My teacher) didn’t
like the way I talked about smallpox and how it was introduced to Native
Americans,” Hopkins recalled. “He offered me a better grade if I left out
information about smallpox and Native Americans and how it was introduced to
our people ... I just kept it. I’ve had my share of teachers that were a little
on the prejudiced side.”

Then, he enrolled at the
Nuweetooun School. The Tomaquag Museum, lead by Spears, founded the school in
2003. Hopkins was in the school’s first graduating class. In a separate
building on the museum’s grounds, two teachers and two teachers’ aids taught
anywhere from nine to 19 students in grades K-8.

Since there was a
moratorium on charter schools at the time, the Nuweetooun School was founded as
a private school supported by grants and private donations. The school’s
curriculum integrated conventional, core subjects with the cultures of Native
American tribes in the lands in and around Rhode Island, including the
Wamponaug, the Mashentucket Pequot and the Narragansett.

The school was forced to
close in 2010, because of a combination of devastating floods and the nation’s
lingering economic woes. Still, the school produced a generation of students
with a strong connection to their heritage. While, as Spears said, “American
public schools were meant to homogenize” diverse groups of students, the
Nuweetooun School did the opposite.

The school interwove
cultural education with English, math, science and social studies. When
studying environmental science, for example, students worked in a garden
containing the “Three Sisters” — corn, beans and squash, the three main
agricultural crops of Native Americans in the Northeast.

The school also offered
a language-immersion classroom, an important feature given that many members of
East Coast tribes don’t speak their tribe’s language.

Through subjects ranging
from dance to pottery to musical instrumentation, students in the school
studied the arts and cultural performances of various Native American tribes.
Hopkins, an aspiring master’s of business administration student, attributes
much of his success to the skills and cultural knowledge he learned both as a
student at the Nuweetooan School and, later, as an intern at the museum.

He described the music
classes at Nuweetooan as key to his growth. Though he was at first embarrassed
by the dances that had been taught to him when he was young, he eventually
became a “champion eastern war dancer.” The experience instilled in him a
willingness to take risks and a confidence in his ability to achieve success
through hard work.

Empowerment network
Both Spears and Hopkins emphasized that the Narragansett value of working for
the betterment of future generations is central to the museum’s work.

Paula Dove Jennings, the
former curator of the Tomaquag Museum and a professional storyteller, said the
museum aims to give youth the skills to preserve their heritage.

“They’re learning what
needs to be done in order to make sure that it’s here for the next seven
generations,” she said.

Although the Nuweetooan
School no longer exists, the Tomaquag Museum pursues the mission to empower
Native American youth through internships, community events and educational
programs.

Children gather weekly
at the museum for an hour of educational activities, and the museum regularly
partners with schools to run educational workshops. The museum also offers
internships through high schools, colleges and the Exeter Job Corps, a
vocational training program for disadvantaged youth.

Through hands-on
volunteer and internship positions, young people learn skills from photography
to finance. Hopkins called his internship at the museum, which took place while
he was attending a public high school after graduating from Nuweetooun, an
opportunity to both learn from and give back to his community.

He learned about his
culture and history when he helped build two museum exhibits: a life-size
replica of a fishing camp; and a diorama of the Great Swamp Fort, a fort built
during the Great Swamp Massacre, a moment of genocide against eastern Native
Americans that Hopkins said is “hidden in the history books.”

Hopkins also taught the
younger Nuweetooan students in math and science, the subjects in which he had
excelled at the school years earlier.

As the only Native
American-operated museum in the region, the Tomaquag also serves as a community
center for Native Americans from all over southern New England. The museum
holds large celebrations of Thanksgivings, which, unlike the nationally
recognized holiday, occurs on each of the 13 new moons. The celebrations draw
indigenous people from many different walks of life, including storytellers and
musicians, traveling from places as far as Maine.

In fact, much of the
museum’s service to indigenous peoples in and around Rhode Island comes from
the connections it creates between young and old, students and professionals.
Spears described the museum as an “indigenous empowerment network,” and is
proud of the many partnerships the museum boasts with other organizations and
institutions, including the University of Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Indian
council and the Johnnycake Center.

Native Americans who
have built successful careers in various fields often return to the museum as
demonstrators and lecturers. This connection provides career opportunities for
native artists, writers and entrepreneurs, all while presenting role models for
Native American youth.

When Hopkins wanted to
try his hand at entrepreneurship, the museum allowed him to use its events and
networks to sell food. Now hoping to attend business school, he credits the
museum with his management skills.

After he graduates,
Hopkins hopes to give back to the community that has supported him. Like the
museum, his goal is to educate both native peoples and the wider southern New
England community. Since Native peoples represent sovereign nations, he is
pursuing a degree in international business. He hopes to help the U.S. business
world understand the diversity of native peoples, who he said are too often
treated with a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Furthermore, the skills
that he learned from both business school and the Tomaquag Museum are not his
alone to benefit from. He said he wants to empower indigenous people, teach
them financial literacy, and how to market and how to run a business.

“I want our kids to find
their way of living in the 21st century without losing who they are as cultural
communities,” Hopkins said.

Thought for the day

“Charlottesville is a great place that’s been very badly hurt over the last couple of days. I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It is in Charlottesville.”

Donald Trump, responding to a question whether he would go to Charlottesville to offer support and comfort as so many Presidents have done in the past.

Quick fact check: Donald Trump does not own the winery; his idiot son Eric does under the name Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC. And at 36,000 cases annual production, the winery is not even the largest winery in Virginia, never mind the United States.

Information and Feedback

If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this.